Category Archives: Furniture Flip

After refurbishing a slew of dressers, we were desperate for a change. It was then that we found this old, solid wood desk for a great price. Bingo. If anything was going to cure our dresser monotony, this would be it.

It had dovetail drawers (always a bonus) and was in great shape. We started cleaning it out and, much to our surprise, found old papers stuffed behind the drawers. Ironically enough, there were a list of addresses from Tennessee, a few were even from the small town Chris’ maternal family was originally from- such a small world!

As much as I love my standard antique white color scheme with oil-rubbed bronze hardware, I knew this desk needed some spice. And what’s spicier than blue drawers (besides those jalapeno poppers that still haunt my taste buds…).

Painting just the drawers blue gave the desk a cute pop of color without looking too over the top. The best part was, this ended up being the cheapest design decision I’ve made to-date. I found the perfect shade of light blue sitting in the oops paint pile at Lowe’s. I knew I only needed a little (I’ve actually used this paint for drawers on two different desks now and still have some remaining) so the little sample jar was perfect. It’s an Olympus satin paint and, unfortunately, I can’t tell you the name because it was a custom mix and mixed, apparently, incorrectly. And, yes, you’re reading the lid correctly; it was a grand total of FIFTY CENTS! After Chris got over the initial shock, a long bout of gloating started as apparently it was thanks to his “good influence rubbing off on me.” Ha!

It ended up being the perfect color for this though! For simplicity sake, we sprayed the whole desk (except the drawers and top) antique white and then I used a brush to paint the drawers blue.

I lightly distressed all the edges of the desk and drawers because, well, let’s be honest, I have an addiction to my sander. It also helped give the desk that cute shabby, vintage look.

Voilah. Blue drawers.

We decided to go with a stained top for this piece so we stripped the original stain and applied Minwax’s Special Walnut stain.

The hardware got a spray of oil-rubbed bronze paint to finish it off.

My favorite part of this desk, obviously, was the blue drawers but the paneling on each side of the desk was a close second. I’m not going to lie- this was a hard piece to give up, even though we already have a desk and not one I’m going to let go of anytime soon (see pics of our current desk here). Chris had to talk me out of keeping this new desk once… or twice… okay, maybe 10 times. It ended up going to a woman decorating her new office space. I swear the woman was Sarah Jessica Parker’s doppleganger so at least I can take comfort in the fact that Carrie would be proud (Chris + all men out there: that’s a Sex in the City reference).

Sometimes waking up early on a Saturday pays off. For example, a few weeks ago I was awoken at the ungodly hour of 10am and was unable to fall back asleep, so I decided to peruse Craigslist, particularly the free section, when… huzzah! Free coffee table! If you’ve ever tried to nab something for free on Craigslist, you know you have to act fast. So I immediately e-mailed the person and asked if it was still available. Well, my “early rise” had paid off as I was the first one to contact them, but I had to be able to get there within 30 minutes. I quickly threw clothes at Julie and dragged her out of bed screaming, “no time to explain, get in the car!” In retrospect she probably thought the zombies had finally come and it was time to bug out. No matter, we had a coffee table to race to!

Well, we got there and picked up the table just in time to beat the rain. It was covered in dust and wasn’t particularly pretty but it was solid wood and it was free, so we weren’t really going to complain. Once we got home and got it cleaned up, we found out it was made by Lane, a rather reputable wood furniture company.

So here she is, in all her 80’s glory:

So it really wasn’t half bad. I mean, it wasn’t really half good, either, but we had something we could work with. We decided to do our typical antique white finish with a stained top. The wood had a really rich grain but definitely needed a fresh stain.

The first thing I did was paint the legs and bottom shelf white. Simple enough, but thinking back on it I probably should have stripped the top first because I got some old stain gunk on the fresh paint job and had to do a lot of touch-ups. Oh well, live and learn, right?

So once the paint was cured, I stripped and sanded the top, similar to how I redid our front door (read more here). Some of the old stain and poly was really on there, so it ended up being pretty time consuming:

Finally, the top was ready for stain. We went with Minwax Special Walnut because a) we already had it and b) it’s a rich color that isn’t so dark it hides the grain.

After a good coat of stain and about four coats of polyurethane (the more coats you use, the more even it will turn out), we had a coffee table looking so good that… you guessed it, Julie wanted to keep it! It turns out, though, that it was a pretty easy argument to win, since our current coffee table was built by my grandfather and will never be replaced. Oh, and the thought of a 100% profit piece had Julie seeing dollar signs and new shoes.

You may remember that our last Furniture Flip Friday post told the unfortunate tale of the parting of my beloved dresser (read more here). Well, Chris owed me and it didn’t take long for me to collect.

Introduce what almost became another sales victim. Yes, yes, it looked very generic and honestly, pretty ugly.

The key is seeing past all the outdated stain and hardware and finding pieces with good lines. I mean, look at the detail in the feet and, while the shell applique is atrocious, I knew it’d make for great detailing once painted. It was a great find at only $35 too, especially for a solid wood piece!

But I knew this dresser was a keeper when it spoke to me. Yes, I had myself a dresser that could communicate. Don’t believe me? Psh, well non-believers, don’t you worry. I have proof.

Such profound words that appeared on the inside of one of the drawers. Was it a question, a declaration, or just a weird come-on? Well, we may never know but you better believe I was “feelin it” as a keeper for my house. Sorry Chris, this one’s staying.

Still having a hard time seeing the potential? Chris definitely was so let’s walk through the transformation.

First we (err… Chris) sprayed the base (drawers out) with primer then two coats of an antique white color.

Then the drawers.

Here’s a trick for you. To help keep the drawers upright, we place one brick against the underside of the drawer and another one on the back inside of the drawer. Fancy, I know.

Next up, hardware. 17 in all, phew. We chose to spray oil-rubbed bronze which would pop against the antique white.

Finally, we decided to paint the top a flat black for a cute contrast (2 coats). After the black dried, we painted three coats of polyurethane to seal it.

It came out even better than I thought. I knew I was going to have a hard time letting go of this one. So what did Chris do? List it for sale of course. I decided to give it two days then secretly take the sales post down. Can you guess what happened? We were contacted by someone interested in buying it immediately. Boo.

And then I did a bad thing… I fibbed a little. I told the potential buyer that it just sold. I mean, it was sort-of true. I just didn’t mention that I had sold it to myself…

Eep, Chris was going to kill me. So I took the obvious next course of action. I went on a desperate search for an identical dresser.

Apparently I had stocked up on some good furniture karma because I found this guy for sale.

Now for a side by side.

Pretty close eh? I got it for only $5 more – still solid wood and a name brand piece, just slightly shorter. The buyer was interested so I just needed to break the news to Chris that we had 2 days to finish the piece and oops, we were keeping the other one. Love you honey!

Transformation Breakdown:

Base Paint: Antique white

Top Paint: Flat black

Hardware: Oil-rubbed bronze

After.

The dresser I saved…

The detailing on the feet and shell applique may be my favorite part. I love how they were really enhanced by the paint and distressing. Before, they seemed to get lost, blending in with the rest of the piece due to it all being the same stain color.

And now for the substitute dresser… Now if only I could always get away with this tactic…

Once upon a time, Chris sold my beloved bedroom dresser out from under me. This is the tale of his betrayal.

His.

OK, I’ll be the first to admit it: Julie really does have an eye for design. She sees potential in things that most people would think is just junk (myself included) and I can honestly say she’s usually right. If only she had felt the same way about my classic Audi:

Anyway, I kind of started to think she was losing her touch when she said she had found a new candidate for our furniture projects:

I had learned to trust her assessment, but this was pushing it. Just looking at it was like warping back to 1981, but I decided to trust her anyway. So off we went.

When we arrived at the seller’s house, all I can really say it that it looked better in the pictures- and that’s saying a lot. This was just about the ugliest piece of furniture I’d ever seen in person, complete with freaky little lion’s head drawer pulls. I mean, what the…?

So once again I decided I should just trust Julie, and I forked over some cash. If nothing else, it was solid wood and was so heavy that the seller had to recruit her son to help me carry it, so I knew it was a quality piece… albeit ugly as sin. I should also mention that my truck was in the shop and I hadn’t measured the rental car they gave me, but it was just a rental, so we just started cramming it in there. If it fits, it ships, right?

Once we got it home, the real work began. We decided we would paint the body white but stain the top. I was feeling lazy and decided the stain job on the top was decent enough, so I just masked it off and started sanding everything else.

All those weird curves and corners really chewed up the sandpaper, plus there was enough furniture polish on the thing to make the surface frictional coefficient effectively zero.

Anyway, once we scraped off all the layers of polish, it was time for the primer. We typically use rattlecan primer because it’s easier to apply, but after this project I went out and bought a respirator mask because the fumes were making me sick.

I should also mention that we pulled all the hardware off and painted it “oil rubbed bronze.”

Finally, it was time to paint. We used to use rattlecans for everything which is decent enough for small jobs like nightstands or small tables, but we discovered that it’s really difficult to spray evenly across large surface areas. Eventually, we wised up and bought a paint sprayer on Craigslist- and it was the best $40 I ever spent. Now we just have Home Depot match a gallon of latex paint to whatever color we like and can spray multiple pieces to an exact match for a fraction of the cost, and without killing any brain cells.

Two coats later, I had a dresser:

Julie is also obsessed with drawer liner:

Depending on how often you creep on our pictures, you may or may not see that this is in our bedroom. Or was. While I’ll happily admit that the final product looked great, it still wasn’t something I was absolutely in love with. After debating it for a few months, Julie finally agreed to let it go for the right price. Low and behold, we eventually got a full price offer, and a young pregnant couple took it off our hands to use as a changing table, which was the first in a very long line of pregnant people we ended up selling furniture to, which was a really weird trend to end up in.

You may have noticed that we’ve been slowing down on room reveals lately. And not because we’ve run out of ideas but, unfortunately, we’re reaching the point of running out of rooms. Now what am I going to do with all this time? Finally learn how to cook? HA!

Hm, I could go through and start repainting rooms over and over again for a fresh, new look but that seems to instantly turn Chris into a grumpy old man.

So, my newest plan has been attempting to convince Chris that we need a new house to re-do… but that hasn’t been going too well either.

Well, finally we found a new venture we’re pretty well-suited for and keeps Chris’ grumbling to a minimum (still looking for that one thing that eliminates it completely… oh yeah, steak and potatoes). It’s something involving paint. Something involving transformations. While this could potentially describe the good ole days where I forced my brothers to sit still for a manicure while the babysitter wasn’t looking (what’s a girl to do without sisters??), that’s not it either. Our latest venture is (drumroll please): refinishing furniture!

There’s such a thrill in finding pieces just waiting for a new face lift, giving it an exciting new life. And thus begins our newest category of posts that we’re shooting for featuring every (or most) Fridays. Soo…

Welcome to Furniture Flip Fridays! I do love a good alliterative line!

First up was this small three drawer dresser we found. It was solid oak, had great drawer hardware, and was just begging for a fresh new look.

Chris (as usual) had his doubts. I have to be honest, so did I. I was nervous this piece was too simple and generic… almost like if IKEA built solid wood furniture, it would likely be this guy.

But, we got him for a good deal and I thought he’d be a good candidate for a new look I was wanting to try out . We’ve primarily been refinishing pieces in antique white and I was ready to visit the dark side.

I decided to go with a satin black paint for a traditional yet elegant look.

While Chloe our cat held the dresser hostage as her new jungle gym, I realized I was at a crossroads: to distress or not to distress. I was tempted to keep it as-is but worried it was still too… well… blah. It was still looking really generic and only a step up from IKEA at this point.

I decided to go for it and busted out the sander.

In the meantime, I’m sure you noticed the glistening hardware in the last picture. I’ve been refinishing most of the furniture hardware in an oil rubbed bronze, but I knew that wouldn’t pop off the black so, instead, I decided to refinish the hardware to its natural brass finish.

In the above picture, on the right, you’ll see what the dresser hardware originally looked like. The handle on the left is what it looked like after being polished. I always use Brasso to refinish brass hardware (especially after this fiasco of first trying to figure out what product to use… tip: don’t ever use vinegar).

Chris had a pretty good idea of using a toothbrush to get in the small crevices. While a great idea in theory, it was taking too long. An old rag or paper towel, some elbow grease, and a lot of patience are really all you need.

I have to say, distressed black and shiny brass hardware may be my new favorite combination.

And it turned out so well, Chris has been rendered speechless or perhaps just distracted by that shiny hardware…

Transformation Breakdown:

Paint: Rust-o-leum black satin

Hardware: Refinished with Brasso to natural brass finish

After.

And as a reminder of how this piece started…

Much better! And he went to a great home – someone bought him to be used in their entryway (and, yes, all my pieces are gender-ized… this one happens to be a short, stocky male). Who knew this hum-drum oak dresser could turn into the statement piece for an entry? Amazing what a little paint will do!